General Motors announced plans to invest more than $2 billion in its Lansing, Michigan region, including $1.25 billion to retool its Delta Township Assembly plant for future hybrid-electric vehicle production. GM is working with the U.S. Department of Energy to redirect a previously awarded $500 million Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant—originally meant for a different Lansing EV conversion project—toward the hybrid push. The plant currently builds gas-powered versions of the Buick Enclave, Chevrolet Traverse and GMC Acadia, and produced a record 291,000 vehicles in 2025.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-27
Biohub announced a coordinated $1.8 billion investment with the Department of Energy, NIH, and new partners to generate and share AI-ready biological data. DOE will contribute over $500 million in measurement and computation, NIH will coordinate standardization of datasets from over $500 million in prior federal research, and Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta are jointly investing $300 million through a Virtual Biology Initiative. The effort aims to build an open resource expanding cell response data across many more cell types and conditions than currently studied.
biohub.org
· 2026-10-08
EIA data show SPR crude stocks fell to 284.6 million barrels for the week ending September 18, then to 283.8 million barrels the following week, marking the lowest level since October 1982. The decline stems from a 172 million-barrel release authorized by President Trump in March as part of a 400 million-barrel coordinated IEA release, with about 133 million barrels structured as swaps requiring Shell, Vitol and Trafigura to return 1.25 barrels per barrel taken starting early next year.
oilprice.com
· 2026-09-29
A federal appeals court struck down the Department of Energy's emergency order requiring the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan to remain operating, finding the government had no factual basis for declaring an emergency. The ruling undercuts the Trump administration's use of emergency authority to override utility retirement plans for aging fossil fuel infrastructure.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-12
EV batteries naturally lose some usable capacity over time, with the Department of Energy estimating a 12-to-15-year lifespan in moderate climates and 8-to-12 years in harsher ones. A 2026 Geotab study of more than 22,700 vehicles across 21 models found average yearly degradation of about 2.3 percent, though results vary widely by car and driving conditions.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-12
A DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously ruled that the Department of Energy's use of emergency wartime powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan running past its scheduled closure was unlawful. The DOE had issued five consecutive 90-day emergency declarations under the Federal Power Act to prevent the plant from shutting down, despite no actual power shortage.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-11
NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion federal loan to refurbish the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, a nuclear plant shuttered since 2020 that Google pledged to help revive last October. The plant is slated to restart in 2029, with Google reportedly planning up to six data centers nearby, while only 50 megawatts of output will go to the local power cooperative.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-08
NextEra Energy has received a $1.9 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to restart the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a 615-megawatt nuclear plant in Iowa that was shut down after storm damage in 2020. Google will buy power from the reopened plant to run its AI data centers, with NextEra targeting a restart by 2029 and citing job creation and grid reliability benefits.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-08
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